Conversations with Heaven

CHAPTER ONE

Making contact

When hearts listen, heaven sings.

Anonymous

As my readers will know, my belief in heaven is strong but to this day I still have moments of great doubt and times of deep depression when there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel – no connection to the other side, just silence and emptiness.

My great-aunt, grandmother, mother and brother all had the gift of second sight. I longed to be like them, but however much I studied or absorbed knowledge on the subject, even attending a number of classes to develop my psychic skills, I never saw anything or had any kind of contact with the afterlife.

When my mother died, like so many people I was completely unprepared for the loss and the unbearable pain. But rather than allow myself to go through the natural grieving process, I put all my emotional energies into looking for signs from my mother. I knew that death wasn’t the end, but I just couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t come to me or show me in some way that this was the case. I became so fixated that I pushed down my grief and I now realise this was exactly why I wasn’t ready to be contacted. At the time I didn’t have the awareness to understand this and I felt completely helpless and alone, so much so that I almost lost my beliefs. Because I suppressed my grief rather than accepting it, I was almost overwhelmed by it and found myself in a deep depression.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with depression, it is like falling into a deep, dark hole. Your life becomes a void; it feels like everything is collapsing. For me, there was an overwhelming sense of darkness. Depression is lonely; days go by in slow motion. I felt trapped, as if there was no way out, I lost all my energy and my hopes were replaced by fear and anxiety about every little thing. I was able to hide my pain from others most days, going through the motions, but I was caught in a downward spiral, unable to connect with my life.

And then, my mother paid me a visit in my dreams. All she did was come into my room and tidy it up for me, but how symbolic, as my life was literally in a mess. She looked great – healthy and happy and vital. It was a gentle first contact but incredibly vivid and realistic compared with my usual dreams. It was a dose of comfort that gave me the strength I needed to get up in the morning and begin to turn a corner; to get my life back on track.

I was already a writer by this point in my career, and I’ll never know why for sure, but it was at this time that I started to collect afterlife stories and write books about them. The experiences I’ve been lucky enough to read about in the years since have filled me with joy, hope and continued fascination. And years after that dream visit by my mother she made tangible contact with me for the first time in a night vision. This time she talked to me and I was able to touch her and talk back to her. We had a proper conversation. My mother wanted to let me know that she was always there watching over me and that I must now take the right path.

Just a day later I was driving behind two lorries and as we came up to a junction something told me to go the opposite way, even though it was the wrong direction for my destination. Later that evening I turned on the news to discover the lorries had been in a crash, which had involved the cars behind them too. Very sadly people had died in the crash and I was stunned; something inside me had said to go the other way and this might have saved my life.

From that day I felt that my eyes, my mind and my heart had truly been opened. I was so much more aware of the messages in my dreams and my intuition. I noticed coincidences more and I noticed life more. In its own way, grief so often turns out to be something of a gift in a spiritual sense – it brings us to stillness, sometimes even to our knees, and at the point we reach out genuinely, we begin the conversation.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Helen Keller

For me, my impatience growing up, and then putting off my grief in my longing to be contacted by my mother, were blocks to seeing what was right in front of me, that I could simply embrace the fact that celestial beings are all around us and we can talk to them whenever we want. For some people they might actually appear in the traditional angel form, with wings and a halo, or in the forms of departed loved ones. And there are lots of subtler signs too, from white feathers to amazing coincidences, from a thought, a feeling or dream, to a whisper or a touch that comes out of nowhere.

Heaven-sent spirits are also there to help heal and support us in our darker times. Although they are not able to take away all tragedy and pain, they are a reminder of pure goodness and love. Last year I had one of my black times again: when I hear about so much death and cruelty on the news I wonder if I have created a fairy tale. Perhaps the atheists are right, I thought, and my belief in the afterlife a pathetic fantasy. Perhaps all the wonderful experiences or angel-saved-me moments mentioned in my previous books were simply a matter of random chance. This book was due but I could not bring myself to write it. I did not feel worthy. My readers deserved better.

With my children entering their teenage years and the economy so bad, I worried excessively about their future prospects of happiness and success in work and life in an increasingly bleak and depressing world. Coupled with my anxiety about getting older and reaching the big five-o, the darkness I had felt after my mother died was back and I didn’t know what to do to pull myself out of its grasp.

With both my parents deceased and never having had close links to other relatives, I had no spiritualist family members to talk to about my doubts and fears and felt increasingly isolated. My husband was a tower of strength but what I needed was some spiritual support. I missed my mother’s wisdom and begged for a sign that she was close by but nothing came – this sent me into even deeper depression. Then when I was at the lowest ebb, hope and light returned through a series of wonderful coincidences . . .

It began with a dream: I was back in primary school, aware that the year was 1976. I was looking for my mother but never found her. I did, however, find a room with her name on the door but the name was not her married name, it was her maiden name. When I woke up I could not get the dream out of my head. I found myself idly Googling my old primary school and found mention of it on Friends Reunited. There was a series of photos and I scrolled through and then got the shock of my life when I saw one that was dated 1976. It was a photograph of the staff and there in the front row was the unmistakable face of my mother. She had been a supply teacher at the school on and off for many years, and would not normally have been included in the photos but for some reason that year she was. This was the most amazing shock, as I had never seen the photo before. I have only three or four surviving photos of my mother as, when she died, I was in my early twenties and it was a time of personal poverty and chaos. In the photo she was smiling broadly and I felt that she was sending me a message to let me know she wasn’t far away.

The magic of spiritual connection didn’t stop there – I went back and thought through every detail of my dream, including the prominent feature of the nameplate using her maiden name. I Googled it and was flabbergasted to find her name on a family tree created by a very distant relative in Holland who was trying to reconstruct his ancestry on the internet. My mum lived and died without the internet, so I had always assumed there was no record of her online. There was an email address, so I got in touch and, to cut a long story short, this person put me in touch with the children of my mother’s sister. I knew I had relatives in Holland but as there had been a falling out between my mum and her sister I had never had any contact with them and didn’t even know their names. In the space of a week, I went from feeling isolated to being surrounded by five Dutch cousins all keen to make contact and interested in matters spiritual! I wasn’t alone. I had family – a huge family – and from beyond the grave Mum had reached out and spoken to me in my dream to let me know that I was part of something bigger and that my life did have meaning and that she was closer to me than ever before.

This remarkable experience fired me up as never before, and after dragging my heels for a year or two with my spiritual writing, it inspired me to finally get down to things and create this book. Throughout my writing sabbatical the letters and emails had continued to pour in and, to my shame, I had not been as diligent in replying as I had in previous years. I stopped delaying and began to reply to them all in earnest. As I read each letter my connection to the world of spirit was renewed and strengthened time and time again. My world felt right again. The people writing to me were like beacons of light and hope – reminding me yet again that heaven exists on earth.

I wanted to write a book to help people going through periods of doubt, isolation and despair similar to the one I had experienced and also to help them discover their own ways to reconnect with heaven. I wanted to publish the many wonderful stories people had continued to send me even when I was doubting myself, as all these stories are amazing reminders that heaven can speak in countless different ways.

About the stories in this book

All the stories are by ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences. I myself am not a psychic, a medium or an ‘angel lady’. I am an ordinary mum of two children who has had some amazing experiences.

I feel very lucky to believe in heaven; to know that every one of us has a guardian angel who watches over us during our life, a source of comfort in dark times, who may shine a light on our thoughts and help us along our path if we have the courage to ask. An open mind and heart dissolve the barrier between heaven and earth; indeed we may be fortunate enough to glimpse a moment of heaven on earth – in a fleeting sensation, when we gasp at a coincidence, perhaps as a visitor in our dreams or in signs that cross our path unexpectedly, when we feel protected, encouraged or inspired by a presence not quite of this physical world. This belief is a gift to me.

Here is just one example of when I have been blessed by the presence of heaven in my life. When I was younger I developed an obsession with, or even an addiction to, exercise. It might not sound like something to be very worried about, but it was really beginning to affect my life. Not that I realized that at the time; I felt like exercise was the one thing in my life that I could both rely on and that I could have control over. But in reality it was getting out of control and I was completely dependent on exercise for my self-esteem and to feel okay about the day ahead. I would run for hours, and if for some reason I couldn’t run I would spend all my time working out in my head how I would make up for the lost exercise the next day. Like any addiction, I began to need more to feel the same way, until finally I couldn’t get the same feelings of being in control because I’d given over responsibility for my sense of self to something that could never make me happy or bring me contentment, however much I thought I wanted it to.

At the height of this obsessive behaviour I was running my usual route in the morning when I had to suddenly stop to tie my laces. I was just by a bench, and sitting there were two women in identical blue coats. I couldn’t help but hear one woman say to the other that thank goodness I’d been made to stop by my laces untying, that she wished I would stop more often as I looked miserable when I was running. I was indignant, and put on a big (fake) smile as I ran past them and continued on my way.

The next day I couldn’t believe it but my lace came undone at the exact same spot, except this time I didn’t see it and took a tumble. A kind man leapt up from the bench and helped me to my feet, guiding me to sit down on the seat and catch my breath. We were sitting just where the two women had been the day before. We got chatting and the man said he also saw me running quite often as he liked to walk early in the morning; he said he thought I must be very disciplined and admired that quality. I told him about the two women from the previous day and how they’d been less than complimentary; as I described how they were wearing identical blue coats he stopped me and looked shocked by what I’d said. ‘You know, my wife and her twin sister died in a car accident together and they always wore the same blue coats. You must be a messenger, chosen to let me know that they are here with me in some way and that they’re clearly okay! This is such a gift, thank you.’

The man looked so at peace – what a great moment here on earth. And I decided to listen to the message for me, too. I walked home that day and took my time to look at my surroundings with open eyes once again, rather than running blindly past everything. In time I was able to be much more balanced about my health and exercise and it turns out that I started to smile a lot more too – not with my teeth but with my heart. I stopped constantly searching for happiness on the outside and began to notice it within. There was a great deal of pain there too, but I began to let myself heal, I began to let go of my old ideas of perfection and replaced self-criticism with more acceptance and love. I’ll never forget how a message from heaven helped me to begin to change my life that day. These are the moments when things shift, when we discover a sense of freedom and embrace the potential for life to be transformed. Spiritual development is, after all, development of the self.

It is a common and understandable mistake to think that you need to be psychic or have a special gift to communicate with heaven, but heaven can be glimpsed by anyone. Heaven does not discriminate! All of the people who have sent their stories are ordinary people with ordinary lives and a number of them were not even religious or spiritual before their experience – but something extraordinary happened to convince them that heaven spoke to them and changed their lives for ever and all wanted their stories to be shared with my readers in the hope that they would offer comfort, hope, inspiration and guidance. All of the stories are to the best of my knowledge true accounts – I have no reason to doubt the honesty of the people who write to me. Some stories have been edited and names changed if personal identity needs to be protected or I felt strongly that it would be best to give another name due to the personal nature of the experiences, but all the accounts are real and true as far as I know.

A time for heaven

There is a time for all things and never has the time been so right for heaven to reveal itself and reach out to us than right now. I have been gathering stories of experiences with angels and the spirit world for many years and have noticed how it seems to be a growing movement, even in an era when we might think that science and reason would be more likely to be gaining ground over faith and mystery. While there has been a decline in religion I think there has been a surge in spiritual hunger, a desire to find the meaning, goodness and love in our world during such turbulent times. For me, it’s almost like the spirits have launched a concerted campaign; they know the time is right. So if we are ever feeling confused, lonely or fearful we can remember pure spiritual beings are right there with us, surrounding us with love and compassion.

I find it fascinating even how readers are often guided to my books in mysterious ways – as a gift or left on the Tube or in a library when they are searching for something else. Each person reading this book is meant to be reading this book.

About this book

Working on this book has once again renewed and revitalized my connection to the world of spirit and helped me look back on my life again and realize that even though I thought heaven wasn’t with me it was there all along – I just didn’t know how to recognize it. I sincerely hope that reading this book will help you recognize when heaven is calling and serve as a catalyst for your belief by showing you that anyone can open their heart and their mind and hear the voice of heaven loud and clear.

The chapters that follow in this book will explore some of the awe-inspiring stories about communicating with the other side that have been sent to me in recent years. There will also be advice about how to recognize, talk to and, most important of all, listen to heaven. Chapters Two to Five will look at perhaps the most common ways heaven can speak to us and those are through our intuition, our dreams and through coincidences and signs, and, in rare cases, visions of angels and spirits. Each chapter will be punctuated with stories from my readers. Chapter Six, however, will turn the spotlight on you. This chapter will look at how you can have your own conversations with heaven. I have written this especially for those who feel they haven’t caught a glimpse of heaven yet and don’t understand why.

Anyone, whatever their age, background, religious beliefs or lack of them, can catch a glimpse of heaven on earth. This isn’t a privilege reserved for the select few, or the most devout, religious or pure! All of us are born with the ability to see spirit in one way or another if we know how and where to look. Think of this book as your guide – where we shall highlight some of the signposts that it is possible to use as pointers to heaven.

I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.

Morpheus, The Matrix

CHAPTER TWO

When heaven speaks

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Anonymous

Communication is how we connect; it is how we understand each other and guide each other. Of course, the most obvious way we communicate is through language, in particular speech, but there are so many ways in which we are able to have conversations with heaven. We may connect through our dreams; sometimes heaven leaves signs for us through objects like feathers, through animals and birds who come to our side, or through coincidences. Sometimes the conversation takes place deep within ourselves – suddenly we feel a heightened sense of intuition or that we seem to have direct access to our wisdom, lighting our path for us.

In this chapter we will explore some of more common ways to hear heaven speak and how you can gain inspiration to move forward by listening to and talking to the world of spirit. There are the times when people experience an incredibly dramatic divine intervention and believe that their lives or the lives of those close to them have been saved by some kind of sign or message from heaven. And then there are the many more subtle ways in which we might have our attention caught by a message from heaven; when heaven speaks to us through intuition, coincidences and in answer to our prayers or questions.

What is consistent throughout all types of heavenly communication is that underlying it all is a language based on love. Feelings are the primary language of celestial beings. When heaven reaches out to touch us in some way, we often feel an emotional embrace. We feel safe and peaceful; our inner strength, confidence and courage are nourished. We might sense the presence of spirits giving us a helping hand, or we might suddenly have a moment of pure clarity, a flash of insight that means we know which direction to go in. As we reach out through our prayers, by which I don’t automatically mean religious prayers, but simply when